Patienceis a quintessential part of becoming a better photographer, no matter the genre—be it landscape, street, or portrait photography. Slowing down, whether at a location or when engaging with a subject, will significantly elevate your ability to create more meaningful and compelling images.
Begin by visually approaching the background before the foreground. When choosing a background, ask yourself:
Does it distract from or compete with the subject?
Do the colors, textures, and lighting enhance or complement the overall image?
Does the background provide balance, depth, or separation from the subject?
Is there visual space for the subject to move through?
Most importantly, does it support the story you’re trying to tell?
I fell in love with the background, but it took 25 visits over two years to capture the right foreground.
Once you’ve found a background that resonates with your vision, let patience guide your process. Explore different camera angles. Spend time observing the environment—what unfolds in that space. Revisit the spot at different times of the day and seasons of the year seeing how the light changes will offer new visual possibilities.
Take time composing your frame. Discover how even subtle shifts—an inch to the right, a step forward, a lower angle—can completely transform your composition. Always scan the edges and corners of your frame for distractions that could pull attention away from your subject. With time, your eye and mind will naturally begin to compose more intuitively and efficiently.
Photography is a lifelong creative journey. Be patient with yourself. Learning new gear, exploring how different lenses shape your perspective, and recognizing how your life experiences influence your photography and storytelling—all of it takes time.
To see more of David Castillo’s work, check out his website here.
This text from a brief talk on my Thinking about Street Photography, as a guest speaker for Maine Photography Workshop, as part of David Castillo’s Street Photography online workshop.
Introduction.
Hi, I am Michael Wayne Plant, I am a Portrait, Street and Social Documentary photographer based in London. I was born in New Zealand, and I started in my photography career in Brisbane, Australia, as a commercial do anything photographer. Subsequently, I made advertising images for advertising agencies, product catalogs for Australias biggest hardware store chain, the occasional wedding and lots of portraits. Then I started to create images for model portfolios and I decided that I liked that a lot. I used to buy Italian and French fashion magazines that were always at least 4 months old, in those days they cost $25.00 (Australian) each.
Once I had decided that I very much wanted to become a fashion photographer, I just did not know how. Once I started to make model portfolio images in dawned on me that I needed to get myself somewhere that I stood a chance of doing well. First I tried Sydney and then I moved to London, originally to assist. Then when I did not get assisting gigs, I started to do what at the time was called model tests which involved working with stylists, hair and makeup artists to build a portfolio.
After a while I moved around a bit to Greece, Milan, New York and then Paris. As I had discovered that they paid to make images for models portfolios. Whereas, in London you paid for your own film and processing, so it was very expensive to experiment and build a good portfolio. Eventually, I got to work with good mid level fashion magazines (like Minx, Spoon, Depeche Mode Cosmo, etc) and fashion clients and I got to make some images, that I am really proud of. Then, I started to feel that I needed to change, as the models where always about the same age and I getting older.
Study
So I went to university and studied an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths. This is the only photography MA in a sociology department anywhere in the world, it enabled me to learn and articulate my practice in a very different way. After my degree, I started to make images using street photography techniques and working along Social Documentary lines, I continue to make portraits these three areas of photography fit nicely together and make up how I define my practice, that will with luck enable me to remain a photographer all my life.
I also started to teach photography and ended up teaching for around 9 years at various colleges, including running a photography department in one Central London College, where each year we had about 700-800 photography students on a wide range of courses on anything from short 5 week courses to year long certificate and diploma courses. Covid came along and I never went back to teaching as my wife’s parents started to need full time care, so we became live in carers.
Then about two years ago, I got a part time job at DxO, doing PR and product liaison. I now work with a lot of photographers and have gained a lot of experience working with people who do a lot of social media and YouTube. This is helping me, as I move more fully into the next phase of what I do as a photographer. Which is to concentrate on an area of photography, that has always been hard to make money with, that is social documentary and street photography.
Philosophy of Street Photography.
My philosophy of street photography is informed by my engagement with the world around me, my academic background and the practice of photographers who are both my contemporaries and those who were active since street photography became a thing.
For me, it is taking moments out of time from our contemporary lives and holding them so they show people in the future this is what life looked like when …. you made the image.
To give you some examples of photographers, Helen Levitt made great images in the 1940’s of kids out on the streets of NYC visually you do not see this anymore. Another example is Robert Frank while he did not start the cross country exploration of America their where others before him who did this, he made one of the most famous bodies of work that combined personal documentary photography with techniques that we now consider street photography which became the book The Americans.
Garry Winogrand is another example of a photographer who struggled with what an image could look like on the streets and I know he made some great images along with a lot of rubbish images. Most photographers working in public spaces make a lot of images that do not work. For one reason or another and if they get a good image that keeps them going, till the next time they get an image that conveys what they what to say about life, as it is lived on the streets of our societies.
I use a lot of documentary conventions in my street photography. In that the only image adjustments that I do is I set my whitepoints, black points, adjust white balance, and do a bit of dodge and burning, effectively lighting or darkening areas of the image to render the image more legible. I am not interested in taking out objects within the frame or sin of sins using replacement sky or generative fill tools. Those things have no place in a documentary photographer’s workflow.
You as the photographer is responsible for what you see and frame to make your image, if you do not want something in the frame, then don’t include it in the photo, find a different place to stand or wait for the offending thing to move out of your frame, do not take it out later with generative fill.
You are the author of your own work and if you destroy your reputation by manipulating your images then people will look at what your work differently. I for one, will never look at Steve Curry’s work the same way again, after I found out that he regularly photoshops elements out of his images. As for me his truth has gone and once that trust is gone, you no longer trust that photographers work, for this reason I do not do it, I never manipulate a street or documentary image.
Fashion images are a different thing, so can portraits be, depending also on what it is that you are trying to say. For example if you are making faltering portraits for someone where they want to look cleaned up and glossy, then go ahead. If however, you are making documentary portraits, then do not ever retouch your images in that way.
Talk about my work.
I have been a digital photographer since 2004 prior to that I used film cameras and I have used everything from 35mm to 5×4 cameras ranging from Mamiya 645, Pentax 6×7, Pentax 35mm then Nikon35mm and Contax 35mm rangefinder’s. For about 8 years, I was a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador. Currently, I use a combination of Nikon (DSLR and Mirrorless) and Leica-M Rangefinder cameras in both digital and film formats.
My favourite way of working is to find a subject and work on understanding it. I am endlessly. fascinated by how capitalism has captured our imagination and has rendered almost any other form of structuring our economic life impossible, to the point now where it is almost like the air we breathe, invisible to us. From that, I aim to make images that visualise this and for me this is really hard, as photography is a visual medium and I am thinking about something that has essentially become invisible to us in our daily lives.
I am not sure if I succeed, however it is something that I am working to render visible. Some photographers manage it. I have recently picked up a book by Kristy Mackay called ‘The Magic Money Tree’ which is a great example of how a photographer has addressed economic inequality and the social landscape created by contemporary capitalism.
With regards to my street photography, I tend to work with Leicas on the street partly because they are small and discrete. No big zoom lens. Also it is more to do with how I use them, I like to look through a viewfinder and to observe the world, sometimes fast and somethings slowly. The ability to zone focus and to practice the setting of distance on the camera by feel with the tabs underneath the lens, with practice becomes faster and more accurate than any autofocus system. This means that I can spend time, concentrating on the things or action that I am photographing.
The standard advice for street photographers is get good shoes, I also think you should also learn where the good coffee shops are so you can have a break. Sit down and rest your feet so that when you are walking that you are not thinking my legs/feet are tired but that you are solely focused on the moment you are observing and all the other things in your mind disappear as you enter into the zone of photography. One thing that always struck me as good advice if you are struggling to make images on the street which Martin Parr once said to me, is that ‘you are not taking their image, but you are making your photo’. It is a small change in your mindset, but it is a huge thing for your emotional ability to make images of strangers on the streets.
The Tony Ray-Jones Approach to making images.
I really liked the list that I saw in a Tony Ray-Jones exhibition about his thinking on his approach that he needed to remember to do when making his images.
It went like this: Approach
Be more aggressive
Stay with the Subject matter (be patient)
Take simpler pictures
See if everything in the background relates to the subject matter
Vary composition & angles
Be more aware of composition
Don’t take boring pictures
Get in closer (use 50mm lens)
Watch camera shake (shoot 250th or above)
Don’t shoot to much
Not all eye level
No middle distance
This list, as it says a lot about a good approach to making images on the street. Though, I am not so sure I like the 50mm lens bit. I do get that though as it does get you closer with out physically having to be there in your subjects face. I like using a 28mm lens for its greater depth of field for any given aperture, I prefer to use a 35mm as it is wide enough to get most things in the frame without needing to be to close to the subject. And when you do get close things don’t look weird from wide angle distortion. I have used a 21mm and that is okay but it is wide and you have to be really careful how you frame your subject.
When I am using my Nikons my favourite lens is a 40mm as it is similar to our own angle of view so it just feels natural. I have 40mm lens for all of my lens mounts Nikon Z-mount, DSLR F-mount and Leica M-mount. I would use this more often on the Leica however the Leica cameras do not have framelines in their viewfinders for 40mm, so there is a dissonance in using them, as the 40mm brings up the framelines for the 50mm lens.
On Making Images.
I walk a lot, I get impatient standing to long in one place, waiting for something to happen, I also think that this is not always a good idea, as sometimes you do need to give a place time to find the right elements, to come together to make an image. As I am getting older, I have slowed down a little. I also get a bit nervous sometimes about raising my camera to photograph complete strangers, especially if they are women as I do not want to be that creepy man with camera.
I find that if my camera is already up making an image and someone walks into the area that I am obviously photographing in, then it is much easier to make another image, I no longer have that hesitancy that comes with raising ones camera to ones eye in the initial moment. Often, I carry my camera as if I am about to use it right then. And it is surprising how often no one ever says anything, or sometimes it can even lead to an unexpected conversation. I am always happy to talk to strangers, as I find I learn new little things about life, as other people perceive it not just from my own perspective. I love this aspect of street and social documentary photography, the learning about others and the lives that we all lead.
Most people, are way to busy to worry about that photographer making images, they just let you get on with it. You can always sense when someone really is not wanting their image made. Especially when you have been working for a while, it just becomes a 6th sense you develop, for me photography is like a invisibility cloak, it lets me be present but also to be engaged with the world, so I can get on with making images. I am not taking anyones photo, I am making my own images, this aspect makes it easier to work on the street.
Right now, I am starting to work on a new body of work and for the first time is a long time I am going to work with Black and White to make one part of the project as a way to create a distinction between two halves of a project. As I have not worked in Black and White seriously, since I went to digital cameras, it is exciting to shake things up a little bit.
